Video: New forms put more information in front of you

If you crave information, you’ll be like a kid in a candy store with the QuickBooks 2012. Over the last couple of releases, we’ve been hearing from a lot of users that they need more information in front of them as they do specific tasks. So we listened! And new for QuickBooks for Mac 2012, we’ve redesigned our forms to make that happen.

Video script:

Hi. I’m Shelly with the QuickBooks for Mac team, and in this video, I’m going to show you some of the changes we made this year to put more information in front of you when you’re using forms such as an invoice or a check.

I’m going to open the Invoice window here and use it to demonstrate some of the new features, but anything I show you here will work the same on other forms.

So you’ll see at the top here there’re are these View buttons. I’m going to click the left one and that’s going to open a panel on the left of the window. That panel shows me all of the previous invoices I’ve already created. I can sort this list. And I can scroll it by clicking with my mouse, using my arrow keys, the next/previous buttons, and, if you’re on Lion, the swiping gesture.

When I want to create a new invoice, I just click Create Invoice at the top of the list or the + at the bottom. I can click the minus button to delete the current invoice in the window. Or the Duplicate to make a copy of it.

Now when I’m ready to print or email, I can click Print or Email at the top to send the invoice right away. To print or email the invoice later, I can mark the invoice with the buttons at the bottom, then use Print Forms or Email forms to send the invoice when I’m ready.

There are other buttons on the form that are specific to whatever window you have open. For invoices, I can add the invoice to iCal, see time and costs, and so on. Depending on the form, these buttons will be different, so if you have a question about what a button does, just rest your cursor on top of the button and QuickBooks will tell you what it does.

Now I’m going to show you one of my favorite new features…Preview. When I want to know what my form is going to look like to my customer, I just click Preview and I can see it. I can even change the template in preview mode.

Now I’m going back to these View buttons and clicking the Right view button. The window expands to show details about the customer that I’ve selected on the invoice. A lot of this information is clickable to take you to other places in QuickBooks without you having to hunt for it.

And the last thing I’m going to show you is the Filter. Say I’m in this window and I just want to see invoices for Anne. I type that name here and then only invoices for Anne show up. Or I can type a date or any other information on an invoice.

Thanks for watching! For more articles, videos, and advice on using QuickBooks, go to quickbooks.com/littlesquare.

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Shelly King works for Intuit as a member of the QuickBooks for Mac team. She’s the Managing Editor for Little Square and its main contributor. Shelly grew up in the South until 1994 when the Internet called her to Silicon Valley. She’s done a lot on the web ever since. Little Square was her idea. Yep, it’s all her fault. See all of Shelly’s articles